How to Easily Improve Your TIG Welds

Maybe you’ve been TIG welding for a while, working on a big project, and your welds are just getting worse and worse. They just look awful. Well, what are you using to grind your tungstens?

Kevin knows a lot of welders just sharpen their tungstens on a 4-1/2″ grinder, with maybe a flap disk on it. If so, you might be causing your own troubles. If you’re using that grinder and flap disk somewhere else, now that flap disk is contaminated with whatever metal you ground with it. When you try to sharpen your tungsten with it, you’re taking the metal right off the flap disk and impregnating it into the tungsten itself.

What you need is a grinder dedicated to sharpening your tungstens.

You might remember from some of his earlier videos that Kevin started out with a little orange grinder he got at Harbor Freight. He even found a set of diamond grinding wheels that he jerry-rigged by boring the hole in the middle of them to get them to fit on the shaft of the little grinder.

He used that little machine for years. He had about $30 in the whole thing. Well, it finally died, so he got a new grinder from Woodcraft, a woodworking catalogue. He shows it has a coarse diamond wheel on one side and a fine diamond wheel on the other. The great thing about this grinder is it only runs at 1725 RPM, which is a lot slower than a regular bench grinder. So you don’t eat up the tungsten – and the stone – as much.

With the diamond wheels and a cordless drill, sharpening tungstens is so easy!

Kevin puts a fresh tungsten into his cordless drill and tightens it up, setting the drill on slow speed. He puts on a glove because the tungsten will get a little warm.

He starts on the coarse grinding wheel first and gets the start of a nice tip, then goes over to the fine grinding wheel and finishes sharpening the tungsten.

Kevin shows the tip. “Isn’t that pretty?” It is so quick, so easy, and does a great job. He keeps the grinder right next to his welding bench, so any time he screws up a tungsten, he can sharpen it quickly and go back to work.

He hopes you appreciate this quick little tip. Before you head out, stick around for a minute and see Kevin try to poke his eye out ….